Managers cannot afford to care about developing youth players

English coaching is rotten at the core, says Matthew Syed.

The ‘‘idiot theory’’ of England’s elimination from the Euros is doing the rounds as, I suppose, we knew it would. Roy Hodgson is an idiot. He is an idiot for resting Wayne Rooney against Slovakia, for playing Raheem Sterling against Iceland, for asking Harry Kane to take corners, for failing to inspire the players, for having bad hair, take your pick.

Now Hodgson may have done idiotic things, but please save your comments about what they were because you would have to be an idiot not to notice that we have been here before. Graham Taylor was an idiot, Steve McClaren was an idiot and Kevin Keegan, Fabio Capello et al were afflicted by various forms of idiocy. Some would even suggest that SvenGoran Eriksson and Ron Greenwood were idiots, too.

The ritualised blood-letting that follows every England departure from a competition (or failure to qualify), the insinuation that whoever was in charge was incalculably foolish (often proclaimed by those who had positively welcomed his appointment), has deeper effects.

It appeases the instinct for sacrifice, cleanses the fans and the upper echelons of the FA, but it also connives in the ludicrous idea that everything would be well if we could only find a new messiah. It is not coincidental that England pay more for their national coach than almost any other country. Hodgson (at NZ$6.6m) earned more than any counterpart at the European Championship finals.

How many times have we heard pundits, moments after blood is spilt, talking about fresh candidates who can take us to a New Jerusalem. Should we have an Englishman, a foreigner, someone who wears a tracksuit or a designer suit? Can we really be so blind to the glaring truth that we have tried these different permutations and kept falling short?

Only when you step back from the madness can you see that the root causes of England’s serial failure are deeper. The man at the top, who spends only a few weeks a year with the players, can make a difference on the margins. That can be significant when the margins are small, as Eddie Jones has demonstrated in rugby over recent weeks. But when the systemic problems are as profound as they are in English football, changing the identity of the head coach is like rotating deck chairs.

So let us list some deeper problems before offering a few solutions. There is a dysfunctional relationship between the FA and the Premier League, a lack of scientific method in youth coaching, a longstanding failure to equip players with game intelligence, a failure to leverage new findings from psychology (and the military) regarding leadership, team dynamics and executing under pressure. There are many others, too. These issues are intimately connected to another problem: short-termism in the Premier League. I was recently invited to give a speech to the first team and staff of a top-four club and focused my remarks on new research regarding personal development and skill acquisition. Afterwards, the manager took me to one side and said that these issues were interesting but not strictly relevant. ‘‘If I lose the next three matches, I am out of a job,’’ he said. ‘‘I can’t afford to care about developing youth players, let alone first-team players; I just care about keeping star players fit.’’

When horizons are measured in weeks, the focus on the inherently long-term question of how to nurture world-class performers is obscured. It is replaced by secondorder questions, such as how to hire top players (leaving development to other nations), quick fixes, and on taking ‘‘talented’’ players out of training for fear of a niggle. Medical staff, rather than providing a vital support service, dominate thinking.

There are bright people in football; a new generation of youth coaches full of energy, vim and a questioning mindset. But there are many who think that they already have the answers, just like in the 1970s and 1980s when that generation thought that they knew best when they had 12-year-olds play on full-size pitches, hoofing it up to a big front man, but never developing skill, touch and flair.

There is a related problem. Leaders in football think in weeks rather than years, they suppose that they can find success by mimicking whoever won the latest tournament. In 1998 we wanted to copy France; in 2010 it was Spain. Nobody seemed to realise that a successful team today has been developed through methods 10 years old (that is how long it takes for a player to progress through a system). England should not be copying what other nations were doing a decade ago, but innovating. We should have the confidence and vision to lead the world. My pitch is that we need, above all, outstanding youth coaches, versed in the latest evidence, not afraid to innovate, and no longer hamstrung by endemic short-termism. Excellence is a marathon, not a sprint.

Think of the world’s most successful institutions, such as Google and Dyson. They relentlessly question the status quo, look for evidence-based advances and their first instinct is not to blame when things go wrong but to interrogate the learning opportunities. This mindset of continuous improvement and long-term vision is the antithesis of the goldfish-bowl mentality of so much of English football, which looks for scapegoats, messiahs and other ‘‘fixes’’.

That is not to say that the England coach is unimportant. We should hire the best. But when the top man keeps changing, and the team keep failing, it is manifest that deeper issues are at stake. TIMES